Missouri Herpetological Atlas Project

About this site

Introduction

This site serves as the official site for the Missouri Herpetological Atlas Project. An updated atlas is published annually, or nearly so, in printable form. The recommended citation for the atlas is contained within the most recent printable version. Unless otherwise specified on the footer of a specific page, the recommended citation for the project site is:

Replace the accessed date with the most recent date you actually viewed the site. Copy on most pages is released and not changed significantly. However, if you wish to cite a specific, immutable version of a page, please let me know and I'll push it out as a PDF document that will be versioned if ever changed. Alternately, check out the wayback machine for archived versions of many Internet sites, even very specialized pages such as this one.

Web Site

All pages have been checked for XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS validity as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). You can see this for yourself by clicking on the links found in the footer of each page. Although it is my goal to make this site fully compliant with accessibility standards as defined by the W3C. Part of this process is ensuring that each page is organized in a meaningful fashion. The "Disable CSS" link, found in the footer of every page, bares the raw content of each page by disabling all visual styling. If you have suggestions on how to make this site even more accessible, please contact us.

Open Source Software

All technology-related aspects of the project are supported by a suite of open source software that is both gratis (free as in beer) and libre (free as in speech). Kubuntu Linux is used as the operating system to host and execute all processes related to the project. Atlas and GIS data are stored in a PostgreSQL database, which has been spatially enabled using PostGIS. Project documentation and database scripts are written with PHP and displayed using an Apache web server. QGIS is used to produce all base maps, distribution, county records, and other maps. The programming language Python is used to create GIS plug-ins for map exports and, along with ReportLab, is used to create the final atlas publication in portable document format (PDF), which was recently declared an ISO standard.

Contributions

The project relies on generous contributions made by those in the software development community. Besides the open source software mentioned above, the following tools have been implemented and are critical to the success of the project: